The present invention relates generally to magnetic transducer head assemblies, and more specifically to a read/write transducer head assembly for recording signals along parallel tracks on a medium such as floppy disk.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,769,469 discloses a transducer head assembly comprising a pair of C-shaped magnetic core halves with the limbs of the core halves being opposed to form a closed-loop magnetic circuit and a medium-contacting face. A read/write gap and a pair of erase gaps are formed on the medium-contacting face. A coil is wound on one of the core halves for read/write operation. To generate erase flux across the erase gaps, a second coil is wound on the other core half.
To simplify the head assembly, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication Sho No. 59-139123 discloses a transducer head assembly which eliminates the second coil by forming a pair of rectilinear erase gaps each extending from each end of the read/write gap at an angle of 45 degrees to it. The azimuth angle of each erase gap makes 90 degrees relative to the fields recorded along opposite edges of a track, making the head insensitive to such fields. With this gap configuration, one of the core halves is trapezoidally shaped and the other is complementarily shaped to form a recess to accept the trapezoid. Since the recess of the other core half has a pair of side protrusions that extend from opposite ends of a center, rectilinear portion which defines the read/write gap with a corresponding portion of the trapezoid, and since the dimensions of the gaps are very small, it is impossible to precisely lap the rectilinear portion of the recess. This is detrimental to the fabrication of a precision magnetic head assembly.